Intel Arc A580 Arrives – Available Worldwide Starting at $179
Intel Arc A580 Launching a Year After Announcement
It’s been a long road, and we’ve seen people come and go, but the discrete Arc graphics product stack is now complete. Intel is (finally) releasing the Arc A580, more than a year after it was initially unveiled. Partners include most of the usual suspects, with ASRock, GUNNIR, and Sparkle offering cards starting at $179 USD.
Why It Matters: Intel Arc A580 graphics represents a compelling new offering in the segment delivering the modern features of the Arc GPU family to mainstream gamers and creators at a competitive price. Powerful gaming features such as Intel XeSS and ray tracing take the gaming experience further, enabling better performance at higher resolutions and hyper realistic visuals.
At 512 gigabytes per second, more than double the memory bandwidth of the closest competitors, Intel Arc A580-based add-in cards are equipped to smoothly run modern games. They also have comprehensive media support including dual hardware-accelerated AV1 decode and encode engines, so creators can work with the codec of their choice.
Built-in Intel Xe Matrix Extensions (Intel XMX) AI engines not only drive Intel XeSS, an AI-based upscaling technology, but also provide great performance in other AI workloads, such as generative ones using models such as Stable Diffusion.
The lineup is finally complete (this slide is from a September 2022 post).
Shifting to the editorial portion of this news post, it seems to this author that the recent discounts to the Arc A750, with $189 the current starting price, make this launch at $179 seem poorly timed. Not that any GPU launching more than a year after its announcement could be well-timed, I suppose. In any case, the market will decide if the $10 USD discount is worth the different in performance. Rest assured, there are day-one performance reviews, including this one from TechPowerUp.